Wilderson 2 - 1NC Short State action and institutional...

1NC ShortState action and institutional ethics makes anti-blackness worse - erases the exploitation of the black bodyWilderson, award-winning author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. He is one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress and is a former insurgent in the ANC’s armed wing, 2003(Frank B. III “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics” Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Strucure of U.S. Antagonisms, Pg 15-16) GG Regarding the Black position, some might ask why, after claims successfully made on the state by theCivil Rights Movement, do I insist on positing an operational analyticforcinema, film studies, and political theory that appears to be a dichotomous and essentialist pairing of Masters and Slaves? In other words, why should we think of today’s Blacks in the US as Slaves and everyone else (with the exception of Indians) as Masters? One could answerthese questions bydemonstrating how nothing remotelyapproaching claims successfully made on the State has come to pass.In other words, the election of aBlack President aside, police brutality, mass incarceration, segregated and substandard schools andhousing, astronomical rates of HIV infection, and the threat of being turned away en masse at the pollsstill constitute the lived experience of Black life. But suchempirically based rejoinders would lead us inthe wrong direction; we would find ourselves on “solid” ground, which would only mystify, rather thanclarify, the question. We would be forced to appeal to “facts,” the “historical record,” and empiricalmarkers of stasis and change, all of which could be turned on their head with more of the same.Underlying such a downward spiral into sociology, political science, history, and/or public policy debateswould be the very rubric that I am calling into question: the grammar of suffering known as exploitation andalienation, the assumptive logic whereby subjective dispossession is arrived at in the calculations betweenthose who sell labor power and those who acquire it. The Black qua the worker. Orlando Patterson has already dispelled this faulty ontological grammar in Slavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, or forced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of “work” isremoved from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of “claims against the state”—theproposition that the state and civil society are elastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of anemancipatory project for the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the state and civilsociety is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Putanother way: no slave, no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues, no slave is in the world. If, as an ontological position, that is, as a grammar of suffering, the Slaveis not a laborer but an anti-Human, a positionality against which Humanity establishes, maintains, andrenews it coherence, its corporeal integrity; if the Slave is,

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